Much ado was made about “One Today,” Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem for president Barack Obama, but also worth checking out is Paul Muldoon’s “For Barack Obama: His Second Inauguration.”
Presidential Poetry
The Transcriptionist’s Tale
“I usually let the thunderous conclusions of love scenes pass without comment, with the exception of one tussle so histrionic that to deny its participants a [JOINT CLIMAXES] seemed downright petty.” Our own Matt Seidel discusses his work as a freelancer for a captioning and transcription company at The Morning News.
Finnegans Punk
Forget One Direction. Meet the little known boy band made up of John Cage, James Joyce, and Joey Ramone. Cage composed a song based on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake called “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” which Ramone later sang to haunting effect.
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OWS: Book Coming Soon
The Occupy Wall Street history will be published by OR Books, a company which rose to fame after publishing Going Rouge, a collection of negative essays about Sarah Palin that was released on the same day as her memoir, Going Rogue.
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Speaking of diaries…
Vanity Fair has published Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to George Orwell’s Diaries, which will be published for the first time next month.
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a small, diamond-like space
Rachel Syme set out to cover the failure of Dawn Powell’s diaries to sell at auction for the New Yorker and came away with a tender meditation on obsession, New York, and the business of biography.
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The Dead and the Pre-Dead
“For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is.” The Paris Review interviews Margalit Fox, a senior writer for The New York Times, on the complicated art of obituaries.
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